New Luddites? Also since when did the Amish become a hate group? I’m not saying they’re not, but it feels like the past 3 days there’s been a lot about it.
Can’t wait to post on the grid about it!
They most definitely did not get it right.
Having said that, there is some value to being thoughtful about the adoption of new technology. Especially when it comes to kids, some parents are too quick to allow their kids to use smartphones, tablets, chatGPT, etc. without much supervision.
But, the prospect of having to forego virtually all modern technology or become exiled from the only family and community you’ve ever known is crazy. It’s really only cults that require that you shun people who have left the “faith”.
Also, the modern Amish are the effect of multiple decades worth of Group Polarization. People in the community will hold different views. If someone has a view that the rules are too strict and that the group should be more lenient, they may eventually give up and just join the modern world. On the other hand, if someone thinks the group isn’t extreme enough, there is no other even more extreme group for them to join. So, they’ll stay and fight for their view. Over time, that means that the less extreme people tend to drift away, and the more extreme ones stay, leading to the group becoming more extreme.
But, the prospect of having to forego virtually all modern technology or become exiled from the only family and community you’ve ever known is crazy.
Sounds like being forced to use meta products to keep in touch with family who don’t want to learn how to use anything else.
They don’t know how to use the phone? They don’t know how to use regular postal mail?
Yeah? Go live authentically with them for a while and report back lol
…it was a joke bro 🫤
Joke sucked BRO
Ok
There’s plenty of grey between those. Also, presumably less oppressing, rape, and inbreeding (more to some old order groups)
I’m glad you brought up the rape! I’m talking dolphin-levels of rape! And if you talk to the cops about it, you’re out of the community!
They also treat their animals like absolute shit, like they should be taken away bad.
Came here to say this. Horrible animal abuse. What they do their work horses is inhumane.
Up and down the East Coast of the US, they’re known for hiding some of the absolute worst puppy mills. It used to be a big thing every time one of them got raided but you knew they were probably just going to set up shop elsewhere. If you saw an ad for golden retriever puppies way out in the countryside of Pennsylvania, you just knew they weren’t going to be treated well at all and probably have horrible health problems.
It kinda depends on the individual communities. My dad’s side of the family is from nw ohio where there are quite a few Amish communities. Where each community seems to function almost like little independent nations with their own rules, cultures, and hierarchical structures.
The small community that is closest to my family’s farm is really nice. Our family has a long history with them often trading skills, resources, and labour. Whenever they need someone to operate a piece of modern equipment or to provide modern tools to a job site they would call my family. We would call them whenever we needed extra hands to build a new barn, or to re shingle a roof.
In my experience the larger and more strict the community was the more fucked up they were. The community next to us wasn’t very strict, lots of loop holes to make life easier. Most of them banned anything modern in the household, but would have a barn with electricity for refrigerators and other modern amenities.
The real strict communities were always filled with miserable people, it always felt kinda what I imagine visiting a 19th century cult would be like. The elders run everything with an iron fist, and children and women were basically treated worse than working animals. Forced to work at weird little businesses to sell furniture, blankets, and baked goods to tourist.
Fuck the Amish
That’s what Amish do…
This, in fact, is how new Amish are made.
Most Amish and meonnoites (less so) look and speak like they are miserable. Like physically they’ll be broken down, have bad acme and skin blemishes, and look like they are 40 at 20.
The life is highly overrated and the Amish are abusive. Mennonites seem to mostly have struck a better balance but it’s a spectrum.
Lots of drug use, which is a-okay by the Lord!
Depends on the community. Medicine and not dying from a cut and no religiouse fundamentalism is quite nice
The only exposure I have with how Amish work is from Newport’s Digital Mininalism book, and it sounded pretty reasonable. (Don’t know how correct it is, though)
The way he put it, they don’t outright ban and refuse all technology. Every time a new tech comes out, they have a few people give it a try and then decide as a community if/how to best use it without sacrificing their core values.
For example - a telephone? We don’t want that, because then it would break the sense of community if you could just call anyone, without having to call on them/meet then for dinner, etc. But, we’ll have one phone in a village in casr we need to call for outside help in an emergency.
Assuming that’s true, I would suspect that especially in regards to medicine, they would be pretty open. But yeah, I guess it absolutely depends on the community, and how cultish/reasonable are the people making these calls.
What they allow is entirely the whim of the local Bishop. Some are super conservative. Others not so. I’ve seen Amish people on e-bikes, while others don’t allow rubber tires on their buggies. Then whenever a new Bishop rotates in, a new toss-up in the rules. One common theme is that they hoard shit tons of money.
Yep, In my experience a community of Amish people an hour away from each other can be radically different. The more laid back communities tend to be filled with hardworking and nice people. While the conservative ones can be pretty dystopian.
Yeah, I kind of assumed that would probably be the case, and while this kind of reasonable approach to technology, that was highlighted in the book, sounds pretty nice in theory, it does put a lot of power into few hands, which historically (and unfortunately) never works very well.
They aren’t open to medicine. Also most adult men have cell phones and hide them.
Every Individual in their community I’ve met has been super nice, but it’s still a cult and they still do fucked up shit.
EDIT: looked it up instead of going off my experience alone. They aren’t categorically anti-medicine as part of their beliefs, but generally don’t go to doctors unless it’s dire.
To be fair, every christianity is a cult. And most religions are divided into various cults. Cults are the local unit of any religion. In ancient Greece, each city would have a cult dedicated to its patron god, and maybe a few cults to other deities if it’s a big city. These days, we’ve got the methodists, pentecostals, orthodox, baptists, lutherans… People always have and always will organise their religion into cults. Larger groups just have weaker cohesion than smaller groups, so people want to be in a smaller group of some kind.
Does seem remotely related to what was said.
Regardless of its etymology, that is not how the word “cult” is used today.
Broke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think the best language is what I learned in school as a child”
Woke: “I’m a descriptivist, and I think anything goes, I’ll respect anything that I can understand”
Bespoke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think we should be engineering new language to shift our culture in alignment with our ethical values”When you’re looking at the validity of a linguistic shift, I don’t think it behooves us to uncritically accept whatever the current culture is. That’s centrism and it makes us weak to fascist manipulation of our language. Which is exactly what the Christians did to the word “cult”.
The Christians noticed that other religions are more likely to use the word “cult” than they are, because the word has a stronger history in paganism, and because these other religions didn’t have big connective organisations like the Vatican. So the Christians created a link between cults, Satanism, and religious abuse. And to be fair, there was a lot of religious abuse happening at the time. Still is. And most of it is Christian. But mainstream scientists could be fooled into thinking pagan religious abuse is somehow different from Christian religious abuse, and thus creating a field of study around so-called “cultic” abuse. And that legitimisation of the Satanic Panic, via epistemic vandalism of mainstream science, is why people think cult means abuse.
I’m a pagan, and lately I’ve been hanging out with some Christians and taking mental notes. They’ve got love bombing. They pressure members to give testimony about how Jesus helped them. They encourage people to give them money, so they can go set up missions in Africa. They use music and AI generated sermons to hype people up on endorphins so they become malleable. They induce seizure-like states as a form of religious experience. I see what the people in charge are doing to them. So no, I’m not going to buy any Satanic Panic propaganda that cults are uniquely pagan and inherently abusive. This shit is epidemic and systemic.
We need to fight back against these powerful and bigoted organisations changing our very means of communication to indoctrinate us.
There is no validity to linguistic shifts. The definitions of words exist as people use them, there is no objectively true way that they are “supposed” to be.
Certainly not any objective truth to language. Just subjective truths. It’s subjectively true that I think the shift in the word cult harms religious diversity. It’s subjectively true that I value diversity. It’s subjectively true that I think the Christian abuse of our language is bigoted and small-minded. It’s subjectively true that I think language should improve society, not make it worse.
Some individuals being hypocrites doesn’t invalidate their way of life. I admittedly don’t know much about them but I remember watching a documentary where the teen members of the community explore the outside world.
One girl comments on the public school education system that the students were focused on passing exams and not on actually learning anything. Always stuck with me.
I would be hesitant to call them a cult, since there seems to be a diverse range of communities and practices. Maga is a cult.
I sold electrical equipment to some Amish once, which felt real weird.
In what way? I assume they must have been familiar with how it worked, or was it like performing a magic trick?
My brother in Jehovah they’re Amish, not an uncontacted tribe
Oh well never met one, and from the little I know they can vary somewhere between late middle age pilgrims up to the run of the mill religious person with a weird hat.
Fuck the Amish. Return to monkey.
You can live from unabomber to perpetually online as you want. I’d love to live in a half hectare with a garden, trees, internet, solar panels, and 45 minute drive to a large town. Read books, WFH, etc. Its what you choose. Unfortunately, it’s money holding me back. Maybe in 20 years
My silent generation grandma was like this she ran a farm with chickens, turkeys, cows, a giant vegetable garden, a couple fishing ponds and drilled into my head that self sufficiency was super important. My parents Suburban life contradicted that message of course. I think about that a lot now
I feel like people are unaware there are intentional communities doing the same but without the religious basis.
Things you say when you spend too much time on the internet and need to touch grass
You got it wrong about Amish. They are not living off grid. They are living normally. We are living on-grid. Or trapped said otherwise.
